The Cover Age, Chapter 21

Sharing custody turns out to be a hassle. It’s the one thing divorcing couples never really seem to consider until it’s too late. Sometimes the judge will give sole custody, which is almost a mercy, because at least then you don’t have to spend long periods waiting.

Georgia always imagined the worst when Clive had her. It didn’t help to count the time. It didn’t help to imagine Clive doing the worst, because the worst Georgia could imagine was her daughter actually preferring Clive.

She’d talk with friends, and all she’d ever focus on were the worst things, everything that made Clive sound bad, and most of the time she even believed it herself. Her friends did because they’d never met Clive, they were all people who entered her life after the divorce, when she really had started all over again. She liked, and tried to pretend that her life before this never even happened. It was a coping mechanism, all of it, sure, but how else could she keep her sanity?

Her life was empty without her daughter. When the pandemic hit she outright panicked. She counted the very seconds.

She couldn’t even look at Clive when he dropped their child off. She didn’t even say a word. A part of her knew this was wrong, that it gave a bad example to her daughter, but she couldn’t help it.

She held her close, her little four-year-old, and rocked back and forth, not because she thought she was holding a baby, but in an attempt to calm herself, and maybe her daughter, too, who responded by gripping at her, too, and then smiling up at her, just the biggest, most heartbreaking smile she could possibly muster.

“We’re gonna be okay, baby,” Georgia said.

The Cover Age, Chapter 20

Clive and Georgia fall in love. They get married, they have a baby. They name her Cover Lockwood. Cover’s early years are magical. Watching her learn is the best thing that ever happened to either of them. Clive didn’t really think of himself as a baby person before Cover, which he keeps telling Georgia, every time she flips, every time she randomly falls asleep, every time she eats...Georgia wonders why all this is so important to him, after a while. She watches him sing to the baby, rock her, carry her...

The years advance. Cover turns one, she turns two, she turns three. She learns to walk, to talk, to feed herself. Clive’s bond with her remains strong. Georgia sees something else, though, a desperation, a yearning, Clive being pulled in two directions. Part of him wants his old life back. Georgia watches this and worries about the future.

Meanwhile, she sees Clive drifting away from her. The more he dotes over Cover, the less he dotes on her. It hurts. She feels like she’s being replaced. A part of her knows this is wrong, that she is not in competition with her own daughter...

The years progress, and the divide widens with them.

In some ways, Georgia wishes she had been strong enough to end it when Cover was a baby. She saw a lot of that, with the other moms at daycare. Georgia tries remembering who she was before Clive, but giving birth to Cover put a fog over everything...Is it just the depression every mom feels after pregnancy? She keeps asking herself that.

One day, watching Clive be reckless with Cover, Georgia snaps. She snatches Cover into her arms and leaves. She doesn’t take anything with her. She doesn’t have a plan. She replays every argument she ever had with Clive. This feels like the right thing to do.

And just like that, their marriage ends.

The Cover Age, Chapter 19

When they first met, Clive and Georgia couldn’t possibly have imagined the fate in store for them, but...that’s the way it goes, isn’t it?

They had gone to see a movie, one of the X-Men, but separately, sitting in the dark theater completely oblivious to each other’s existence. They sat in different parts of the theater. Georgia was with some friends. She fell asleep at one point. This wasn’t really her kind of movie. She sucked on her soda and ate cookie dough bites, and that was the highlight for her, well, that and Hugh Jackman. By the time the credits rolled, she was more than ready for the movie to end.

Walking down the aisle, she listened to her friends chatter about it. Sounded as if everyone else had enjoyed it quite a lot. Par for the course. Sometimes Georgia had no idea how she ended up with these friends. Actually, they were coworkers. That was pretty much the explanation right there.

She literally ran into Clive after dropping her empty candy packet. Anyone else, if she had been anyone else, and it would’ve never happened, and her life would have turned out very differently. But she stooped to pick it back up, and that’s when Clive ran into her.

“Sorry,” Clive said. “Guess that’s two disasters today!”

Georgia almost didn’t respond. In truth she was pretty annoyed, but as much about the collision as the movie experience, and her friends, and her life in general...

“Yeah!” she said. “Tell me about it.”

“Uh, Clive,” he said.

“Clive, your glasses are falling apart,” she said.

“Keep meaning to replace them,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Listen, let’s do something. Uh, okay? I’m Georgia.”

Her friends shrugged. She didn’t care what they thought anyway. They clearly had bad taste in movies, anyway, right? They walked off. She and Clive strolled to the concession stand.

And that’s how things began.

The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 6

I met Marietta, Fox, on her blog. She was writing a story, and happened to include my name, and at first I thought it was deliberate, because my name isn’t common, won’t pull up thousands of results in Google, but it turned out to be a coincidence. I was prepared to leave it at that, but then I researched her, and found out we lived in the same city. When I asked her to meet up, at first she was weirded out, but then I guess she decided it wasn’t such a bad idea. We met at a Chipotle, stood in line for a few minutes chatting, and it wasn’t until we were at the counter, next up, that she admitted she hated Chipotle, and... I had to laugh.

That set the tone for our relationship right there. We never did go back to Chipotle, but I guess there was something there, and we continued to explore it. When I got around to explaining what I did for a living, though, things got weird again. They got weirder when I admitted to guiding Clive Lockwood to her blog, in the hopes of arranging a meeting down the line. I had figured Lockwood as a person of interest, had come to town for that express purpose, and...She decided I was using her, and that it wasn’t cool. That about ended things in a heartbeat.

I screwed it up. Absolutely. Worst mistake of my life, probably, and I suppose that’s saying something. I could sit here rehashing the relationship, and maybe you would feel sorry for me, or maybe dismiss me as a monster, and perhaps you already have, and that would be one of the great ironies. I don’t see the point. Listen, it’s been a long journey, and maybe I reached the point where even I couldn’t make sense of it anymore. After it ended with Fox, I maybe grew a little desperate, started grasping, and lost the thread...

Which brings us to 2020, the year of the pandemic. How does the Ostwald business connect with Lockwood? Did it turn out that Ostwald was Lockwood after all? Well, that would be convenient. Even tidy, wouldn’t it?

But the truth is, I’m not even sure Lockwood was a vampire. I killed him just to be sure.

The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 5

I was in Orono, Maine, in the fall of 2001. I was there as a matter of coincidence, when Ostwald was there, too, in his role as a poet, participating in a workshop at the university, as a “celebrated Chilean.” The business that had brought me back to the United States was a few years ahead, but I was already involved, already entangled in matters that I still have yet to fully understand, but there was little confusion as to my purpose then, on the hunt for Ostwald, the golem, whom I believed at that point to not only have been interested in vampires but for all intents and purposes to be one himself, at that point. I never worked it out, myself, never got a chance. Events spiraled out of control, and at any rate, as I’ve said, Ostwald turned out to not been involved after all.

Nonetheless, I was there when the attacks happened, when the details emerged that some of the terrorists had passed through the nearby city of Bangor, and for a moment, I convinced myself that Ostwald was involved, but...

The problem was, the Nazi menace had died. Even if there remained fanatics, the Reich itself was defeated, never to arise again. I had turned Ostwald into a vendetta.

Ostwald gave his reading, and I sat in the audience, until the moment I entered the room unaware that he was even there, and yet there he was, and I realized with awful clarity that it was starting all over again, and I imagined him watching me the whole time. Students sat enraptured, or sleeping. They had no idea what he was talking about, but it was less difficult for me to decipher. His verse spoke elegantly of Chile, as we had known it, a man in a white suit. But where others might see tragedy, I heard mourning. This is what Ostwald had been reduced to, lamenting a lost cause, because of course that is what it was, and what it would ever be, a dream for sadists, perhaps, but nothing more. Just something to hang window dressing on.

I shuddered to think of it.

I said nothing. I didn’t clap when he finished, and I avoided him, the man I had so eagerly pursued across years and continents, full of momentary clarity, but it didn’t last. I lost myself in the madness once more. But after that I vowed it would never happen again.

This Ostwald was not worth my time, but perhaps my pity. Anything more would be tragedy of a different order entirely...

The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 4

For a time, I lost track of Ostwald. I became convinced I found him, once, under another guise, but I was wrong, a fact made clear by an old friend named Holloway. This is what brought me to America, but I had investigated those shores before, before I had ever heard of Ostwald, and in truth, did not relish visiting them again because of it. But I wasn’t to leave them soon. In fact, as it turned out, I never did.

The first visit was in the time of the eugenicists, who in any other age would have been called by their rightful name: Nazis. But this was in the early days of the Reich, when there was no one brave enough to call them what they were, before it was easy, before it became mandatory, and one might dare say, disingenuous.

The celebrity of the times was an aerialist named Roth, who for the first and last time in popular history embodied the perfect Teutonic ideal of blond hair and blue eyes, a fitting confluence of the times, far more than anyone cares admit. One could make history every day in the early days of aeronautics, but Roth had an open invitation to adulation that was suffocating then and has never seriously subsided, except into the silent pages of history.

Later, when I watched Ostwald’s theatrics in Chile, I should have known from the start that something had fundamentally changed, or perhaps reverted, but it was too late before I made the connection, and I would have to endure many years of shame, knowing I had let such a monster slip away from me.

Roth would pose for a picture with anyone. Before movies really took up, pictures were the most coveted medium. One could suddenly become immortal in the blink of an eye. I found myself herded into a group shot with Roth, one of many anonymous Europeans basking in the glow of perfection. In the picture, I’m the only one not looking toward the viewer, my gaze instead inscrutably off to the side, but every time I could stand to look at it, every time it showed up reprinted somewhere to repeat Roth’s glory, I could remember exactly what I had been thinking, and... it’s nothing I can repeat now.

Roth eventually faded into his many pictures, vanishing from public view conveniently at the same time the Reich was held an enemy to mankind.

I was dispatched back home, and then given the Ostwald assignment, but I suppose in hindsight it had already begun...

The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 3

It’s still hard to believe and barely remembered or understood, but the rats fleeing the Reich ended up in South America, which included Ostwald, and of course I followed.

For a time, I lost track of him. I settled down in Chile, where I was convinced he had gone, but could find no trace of him, and so I attempted to find a new life, perhaps my own, for the first time in years. What I found there was a surprisingly thriving poetry scene. There were workshops everywhere, visible, not the frivolous nature of the medium that exists today, and I suppose if there was Neruda to celebrate, there was reason enough to keep the flame alive.

I had never written a word of verse before, had never even considered it, and so in the early days I sat listening and scribbling, every now and then, when I heard something I particularly enjoyed, or that inspired me. There was a lot of chatter, in these workshops, that had nothing at all to do with poetry, gossip of the kind that made the country come alive for me, epics woven around legendary rogue figures of transitory nature, local fodder, most likely to be churned up carelessly by the vagaries of history. My kind of place, at the time, when I could use the distraction.

Eventually it occurred to me that one of the figures endlessly discussed in the workshops was in fact Ostwald, who attended rival workshops and had even been known, in the past, to have visited mine, or what I hoped I could claim for my own, if I could just manage to write something, anything. I told them, You know he was a Nazi, right? And they said, Sure, but everyone here is these days, or hadn’t you noticed?

I felt foolish, but the embarrassment was enough to spur me on, and that night I wrote my first tentative piece. I called it “Nazi Crimes,” and it is not worth sharing now, but it was enough to convince me it wasn’t a waste of my time, and hopefully no one who heard it the next week.

Somehow Ostwald, who was using an assumed name, an outrageously preposterous one, Renato Guerrero, seems to have heard my poem, or have heard of it. He was training, perhaps for the first time in his life, for military service as a pilot, but found the time to attend one of our workshops. He told me he liked the poem, but I remained unconvinced he’d ever heard it.

It was not until the workshop ended, late in the evening, that he betrayed ever having seen me before, but all he did was give me a rueful smile, and that was that.

Later, after his plane had crashed during a foolhardy attempt at sky-writing, having failed to spell a single distinguishable word and yet still managing to get his message across, I visited Ostwald in the hospital. I asked him if he remembered me, so we could all be clear about it, and all he said was he would be leaving the country soon, and hoped our paths would cross again. The way he said it, though, sent chills down my spine. It was only then that Ostwald began to seem unnatural to me, but looking back, I wonder how that was possible.

The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 2

When Ostwald was reassigned to France, I followed. It was here I learned the true nature of his experiments, here I learned the tissue samples he labored on day after day came...from vampires. I had no idea if he pursued this path at the behest of the Reich, or if it was a private matter. Again, he reported to no one, and it was as if he had been put into exile.

The nature of the Reich itself came into focus, not in Munich but Paris. This was a population forced to live under the Reich, not as the conquered or the oppressed, but as the embodiment of what the world might look like if the Reich succeeded. Every interaction was a test of will, was a test of loyalty, whether to the occupation or to France as it had been, and many hoped would be again, though life continued in a semblance of normalcy. There was no war here, no visible resistance, as it would look like in later decades, constant acts of destruction, their toll taken on themselves, a constant act of martyrdom...

Having breakfast at a cafe:

“Yes, I will have coffee, thank you.” (The Reich spoke French here. The cafe workers spoke French. I spoke French.)

The waiter gives me a neutral expression, but I have been here long enough to interpret it. You can fool those who aren’t paying attention, see only what they choose to see, sense danger only in expected ways. To my eyes, the waiter distrusts me, would rather I didn’t come to the cafe, but I do, every day, despite such a reception, daily. It is not easy, living like this, the doubt manifest in every ordinary action, never with the agonizing certainty that something will happen, with sudden awful clarity that such a thing would be better.

Ostwald, of course, never went to the cafes, never went out at all. He may have been a golem, but I understood his obsession all too well. He saw a glimmer of recognition in the tissue he examined, something otherwise impossible, which made it doubly so, for anyone but himself, and I, although he didn’t know it, would never have been able to reconcile the existence of golems and vampires, much less at the same time, much less together.

He never suspected me. He was careless, too fixated on his own thoughts.

But I saw no vampires in Paris. I don’t know where he found his samples, but he was a golem, and I knew as much about golems as I did vampires, then.

The waiter brings me my coffee, and I register the scowl hidden deep within, and choose not, as always, to address it, and he walks away, and the coffee of course is too hot at first to do anything but sip. I stir it with a spoon for a few moments. The Reich walks these streets as an everyday sight. Dreadful. Ostwald never gave the salute, either. Not once. But it didn’t matter whether or not he considered himself a Nazi. That was the real crime in it. Perception is everything, isn’t it?

The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 1

How am I to tell her? How can I tell her that I don’t even know if that man was what I said he was? How can I tell her that the war I’m fighting began a long time ago? And that even if I tell her about it she’ll think I’m crazy, crazier than she ever dared suspect before? And how can I convince her that it’s all true? How can I tell her that I think the man I just killed...wasn’t a vampire at all, but a Nazi golem? A golem I’ve been chasing across history, around the world, beyond the boundaries of all reason...

I had been sent as an infiltrator to Germany, having learned the language while investigating a different matter in Sweden, the home of my birth. My skills, such as they were, the subject of scorn and ridicule previously, were thought adequate to the task at hand. The year was 1938, and the Third Reich was well on its way to attempted world conquest, an overblown response to matters that had nothing at all to do with its origins. Strangely enough, it was then that I adopted the name Oliver Row, then that I learned a great deal of things that would be...tangential to this narrative. Suffice to say, then that I began my present course, no matter how long and winding as it has been.

The Allies had learned of a great many alarming things that were being said about the Reich. Some were of immediate concern, some of military significance, and some that would need to take time to handle. In later years it became difficult, I know, to separate the urgency of response to all of them, and history is of course right about that, and also at an unfair advantage, for having no burden at all to do so.

The golem was considered least of the priorities, having the least likelihood of being real (and there were more doubts about the Reich than you would now believe), so I suppose that’s why the assignment fell to me. I packed my bags and prepared my papers to be welcomed with open arms by Nazis, as if such a thing did not send shivers down my spine, then as now.

The man I was assigned to was a biologist named Ostwald. An unassuming individual, Ostwald accepted me without question, which was less than I could say. I couldn’t understand how such a man, of negligible connections within the Reich, certainly no one of any importance, would warrant scrutiny much less active surveillance. I worked in his lab day and night, and saw nothing that seemed relevant to the reports of the golem I had memorized, and he seemed to have no social life nor activities of any kind outside of his home. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a tedious task, and Ostwald a tedious man.

It wasn’t until I saw him make it rain, once, when he grew frustrated cultivating a mundane sample from a frog’s liver, that I realized the truth: Ostwald wasn’t working on the golem project, he was the result of the project. Ostwald was the golem itself!

From what I could tell, no one seemed to have realized. Perhaps one moment he was an inanimate object, and the next a perfectly ordinary man, or so it looked. He might have duplicated one of the scientists from the project. It didn’t matter. No one believed my reports. It was suggested I should retire the field.

I would do no such thing.

The Cover Age, Chapter 12

It felt like the very next day, or in his worst moments, only a minute earlier, the lockdowns began. Clive gave up custody of his daughter and then plunged into the uncertainty of not seeing her for a long, long time.

He began to let it get to him. Suddenly, as it was for everyone else, even though it was something that had been talked about for months prior, the pandemic became a reality only when it proved how much Clive could lose because of it, not his health (he never became sick, although he could of course never prove he hadn’t been a carrier, without being tested), but, yes, his daughter.

It was the old adage, writ large: You don’t know what you have till it’s gone.

The ex was not someone who would even consider violating the restrictions, or if she was, certainly not so Clive could still see his daughter, whether because of the split and therefore out of callous vengeance, or because she’d always been that way and was thus another thing Clive had previously failed to notice.

He still tried calling, daily, pestering his ex, he understood, further aggravating the divide, but...it was his daughter. He cared about his daughter. He needed his daughter, now more than ever. He vowed what every petitioner vowed, that he would never make the same mistake again, that he would never take her for granted again, that she would never be given a reason to doubt his love again, much less fear him. None of this spoken in the pointless messages left on his ex’s phone. The words he did leave, equally pointless to dwell on.

So, the despair mounted every day, made them longer, beyond the sudden emptiness, not merely for the loss of his daughter, but of course the fact of the lockdown, no place to go anyway, regardless of how often Clive had left his home before. A prison.

He didn’t spend his days in misery, paradoxically. They were filled with the things he had always loved doing. He did end up working on his anthologies (wondering if there was a point to rush them into publication though he did). He read books, he watched movies. He went for walks.  No one he encountered on his travels made a point of the fact that he never put on a mask, never questioned if he should be outside at all. He felt he missed what so many others complained about. He never lost his job, he was never lacking for funds, for food.

But he missed his daughter. It wasn’t that he feared that she would get sick, or his ex. He supposed if the ex became ill, that would pose a problem. He wondered if she would relent then, but then he weighed her spite again, and found himself on the low scale again.

By the time he saw Fox’s blog post, about the so-called monster hunter claiming to know for a fact that all this was caused by some kind of conspiracy hiding an uglier truth...Clive didn’t care. It sounded like nonsense, like everything else. It was mildly alarming, to learn suddenly that he and Fox lived in the same city. You don’t spend time on the internet interacting with people you could meet in the real world, not if you were doing it right, anyway. Then again, how would Clive know? He didn’t seem to have done anything at all right.

He never told Fox, but Clive knew who she was all along. She was his daughter’s caregiver. Of course he knew. He chose to pursue a fiction. Probably as he had with everything else. Out of self-pity, he agreed to play along one last time.

And died because of it.

The Cover Age, Chapter 11

The regularly-scheduled handoff approaches. Clive doesn’t really think anything of it. He’s gotten used to having his daughter in his life and then not. At first it caused him considerable misery, when he didn’t have her, because he’d gotten used to having her in his life, more misery without her than over the ex. Even if he didn’t exactly know how to appreciate his daughter, he still knew that he did.

This happens soon after replacing the glasses. They share a few more smiles over them, Clive wiggling the frames in an unnecessary effort to emphasize them, and then she’s gone, Clive watching as the car pulls out of the driveway, watching as the car drives down the street, Clive watching as it finally disappears out of sight...

This is always the difficult moment, but for some reason it feels worse this time.

Then he heads back inside. He hasn’t been able to work on his writing projects in weeks. He wonders if subconsciously that’s why he feels simultaneously annoyed with his daughter and appreciative of her presence, why he so easily slipped into taking it for granted, letting her exist, for all intents and purposes, in a different world, a different room, virtually the whole time he has with her, why he snapped, why he finally began to wonder if he was in fact the bad parent, and perhaps even the reason why all this happened in the first place.

He boots up the notebook and opens a file, hoping to be inspired. He knows he needs to do some editing, but instead begins dropping in more material, hoping that later he’ll feel more motivated. Sometimes he feels as trapped by the anthologies as the mess he’s made of his family.

He doesn’t think anything of switching on the radio, doesn’t think anything of the expectedly mundane banter between hosts. Glosses over recent developments in the emerging pandemic. Briefly notes that they’re cancelling sporting events. Doesn’t faze Clive, as he never attends them anyway.

Bored, Clive begins surfing the internet, checking in with blogs.

The Cover Age, Chapter 10

Clive and his daughter are playing, roughhousing, having a great time, when his glasses accidentally fall off and break. Clive becomes furious. He completely loses it, without thinking about how this will affect his daughter at all. She begins to cry.

He immediately brings himself under control. He tries every way he can imagine to calm her. He apologizes profusely. He tries to make it funny. But of course it’s already too late.

Finally, she offers, sniffling and wiping back tears, to tape his glasses back together.

“No,” he says, “that’s not necessary.”

He tries to explain that he wouldn’t want to wear glasses that have been taped back together, even if it was a very good job, but this doesn’t make any sense to her. All she sees is the angry dad in the moments after the accident happened, as if he blamed her and there’s no way possible to make things right again.

Even while this is happening he’s wondering how things could have possibly developed this way, how he could have failed so spectacularly.

He suggests, after a few minutes, that instead of trying to fix them, they will replace them, and he will let her pick out the new frames. She ends up choosing blue ones, and is absolutely adamant about it. She knows a boy with blue frames. “They’re definitely normal,” she insists.

He relents without much protest. She giggles when he puts them on for the first time. She smiles every time she looks at him after that.

It feels right.

The Cover Age, Chapter 9

“Daddy?”

“Yes, dear?”

“I think it’s time you get new glasses.”

“Okay, dear.”

“Your old ones are falling apart.”

“Yes, dear.”

“They’re missing one of the leg things, daddy.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I really think you should replace them.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I think they should look fancy.”

“Yes, dear.”

The Cover Age, Chapter 8

They’re arguing again. Of course they are. Toward the end of the marriage, that’s all they did. They forgot what it was like to actually like each other, that it had ever been possible at all. It was like a switch. One moment they had every reason to love each other, and the next, every reason to hate.

His daughter is, again, in the other room. He knows she can hear. He knows this is having an effect on her, that the person she will become is being shaped, how she handles relationships, if she trusts them at all. He knows and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s powerless to stop himself from talking to her mother any other way. It hasn’t really been talking for years, though, has it?

The argument has nothing to do with the pandemic. Nothing has been done, yet, in the country, about it. Everyone is still focused on other things, even while in other countries, it’s become a real problem, inescapable. Neither of them has any idea that the choices they’re making now will be even worse, for both of them, for their daughter, in a few months.

He hears her playing, in the other room. His heart is breaking, all over again. He feels like a massive failure.

He hangs up, cutting off the argument abruptly. He can’t take it anymore. He gave up any real semblance of communication long ago, and he knows it.

His daughter begins skipping down the hall. He can tell without looking because he’s seen it before, knows what it sounds like. He almost gets up to go skipping after her. He’s done it before. He doesn’t know what stops him. It’s as if everything he loved, everything that he was, ended without him realizing it, a consequence of a decision he didn’t understand at the time, that seemed like the right thing, but has only caused him more pain. That’s not how it was supposed to be. Instead, he’s stuck in a holding pattern.

Perhaps in time it will all make sense, perhaps in time it’ll all work out. He feels tears forming.

The Cover Age, Chapter 7

Three months earlier.

Clive is sitting at home, listening to the radio. His daughter is playing in the other room. He knows he should be in there with her, that this is precious time, but this is the way it is, as it has been since she was born, before that, even. It’s the weekend, one of her sporadic visits, since the divorce. It’s all scheduled out, every visit, as mandated by the court, and yet Clive can’t help but view the results as random. He has trouble concentrating, maybe. He still can’t believe any of it really happened, that he has a daughter, that he had a wife, that it has all come to this.

It’s still early. The radio show is between songs, the hosts are bantering. Clive always wondered if he could have gotten a job like that. Never seemed very hard, and clearly the results aren’t asking for much. But he was never good around other people, or didn’t think he was. Even as a disembodied voice, the problem would be the same. It’s all a lot of babbling, the kind you can pay attention to and tune out at the same time. He sits immobile, frozen. He hears his daughter, in the other room, better than the radio that’s right next to him.

They’re talking about cruise ships. Fantastic, he thinks, something I’ll never get to experience. Apparently they’ve been quarantined? Okay, well that makes them mildly interesting. He pays attention, just a little more. His daughter, four years old, sounds like she’s climbing something. He should probably look into that, make sure she’s safe.

He doesn’t get up. Is this quarantine business a big deal? Should he be worried? The hosts don’t seem to think so. Just another blandly amusing topic for them.

He hears a crashing sound. He rushes to the other room, finds his daughter on her back, and the minute she sees him, she cracks a huge smile and starts laughing, and he joins right in. He’s probably as bad a father as he’s been told, repeatedly, explicitly and otherwise, but he doesn’t care. His daughter gets back up and he asks what she was trying to do, so she shows him, and tries to do it again, and he doesn’t stop her. Of course he doesn’t. Why would he?

The Cover Age, Chapter 6

Clive was dead instantly.

“Wow,” I said. “Not exactly subtle.”

“Well, he was a vampire,” Oliver said. “And he didn’t even know it.”

“According to what you told me,” I said, “not just any vampire.”

“No,” Oliver said. “No he was not.”

“Still, this was a stupid plan, Oliver,” I said. “Even during a lockdown. This is still out in the open. I’m surprised it hasn’t already caused a scene.”

“He was invisible the whole time, Fox,” Oliver said. “You could see him only because he wanted you to. He might not even have known he was doing it. He told you he had a family, that he had a kid? And you took him at his word?”

“I had no reason to doubt him,” I said.

“This is the real problem,” Oliver said.

“Vampires,” I said. “Not the pandemic. Despite all the media coverage. Vampires. Even with a body in front of me, this sounds like a stupid conspiracy, Oliver.”

“We need to get going,” Oliver said.

“And do what with the body?” I asked.

“It’ll take care of itself,” Oliver said. “It’ll...disintegrate. As if it were never there.”

“An invisible body will disappear,” I said.

“Yes,” Oliver said.

“This is exactly why we broke up, Oliver,” I said.

“I seem to recall other details,” Oliver said.

“Oliver,” I said. “Shut up.”

The Cover Age, Chapter 5

The bus was mostly empty, and by that I mean that when Clive and I boarded, that made a total of three, including the driver, who nodded as we climbed the steps, waving us off, both actions without really looking at us.

“Slow day,” Clive said.

They were all slow days. Even having so much experience with my own time, it left an impression on me. I had been more than happy for Oliver to break up the monotony. We continued traveling in silence. The farther north we got, the emptier the landscape. We were alone on the road for long stretches. The driver was talking to herself, probably not even aware she was doing it, so used to the bus being full, even if most passengers were painfully quiet, wary of sharing space with strangers, even if they saw the same people every day. But there would always be chatter, and someone blaring music. I noticed the radio was off, long after it should have been obvious. Public spaces, confined ones, usually offer compulsive sound, almost as a reassurance. Not during times like these, I guess, at least not on this bus. I became more surprised by the moment that the bus was even operating. Never took on anyone else. No one was waiting. Horror movie vibe, finally, I guess. It’s the little things adding up that cause the chills in those things, not the monsters. The monsters break the tension, not because you’re waiting for them, but because the mood has already been set.

We got off at an abandoned mall. Oliver Row stood in the parking lot in a long trench coat, collar pulled up around his neck, staring off in a different direction, like the bus driver.

“Fox,” he said.

“Oliver,” I replied.

“Clive,” Clive interjected, but seemed to notice that no one had asked. Oliver was agitated already, and huffed out a snort upon hearing.

“No need to be rude,” I said.

“You have no idea,” Oliver said.

“Let’s get on with it,” I said. “Time is a precious commodity, even now, at least for things like this. We’re going to start attracting attention.”

“Won’t take long,” Oliver said.

And then he threw a knife at Clive’s chest.

A Fisherman At Sea

It’s the same in every age. There’s a select few who are truly faithful, regardless of what they believe; there are others who are casually faithful; some who blatantly fake it for personal benefit. But most of us don’t believe anything. We cling to some ideas in ways that are a lot like faith, but our faith is mostly in mundane everyday life.

In my day, there’s great pressure to pay homage to repackaged Greek gods (let’s face it). And there are the Jews, and there are Christians. Those are the ones that most baffle me, the Christians. They’ve been around a few years, a few decades maybe. Their origins are a little obscure. I’m told their founder died an enemy of the state. Not sure what his name was. Probably not important. I’m told in Rome they murder Christians for entertainment, and some of them, the truly fanatical ones, actually seem to welcome it! Martyrs, they call themselves.

Well, it’s a lot of nonsense, if you ask me.

I’m a fisherman by trade. My father was, and his father before him, and so on. I live and die by the fortunes of the sea. There’s a god for that. There’s a god for everything, I suppose. I mostly tend to keep to myself. Sometimes I need a little help, and sometimes I give a little help to others.  Today I needed some help. There’s a guy I’ve known tangentially for ages, always keeps to himself, sort of like me, when he isn’t gone for weeks at a time. Bad fisherman, I say.

So anyway, this guy helps me out, silent the whole time. By the time he’s finished, I ask him what he does, when he’s away. At first he remains silent. Painfully shy, I’m thinking. And maybe so. He asks me, after a while, how much I know about what happened a few years back. I say he’ll have to be more specific! He says, your father would know. I say, my father might have, but never talked about it. He says, your father worked on the sea with my father, and they weren’t anymore friends than we are.

Okay, I say. That’s impressive. Now, ask me why, he says. Sure, okay, I say. Why? Because of what happened a few years ago, he says. Now you’re talking in riddles, I say. It would be appropriate, he says. The stories his father used to tell him, they were all about riddles.  Riddles about a man who lived a few years ago, about humanity in general.

Okay, I say. Wait, is this about religion? I don’t need any, my friend. This is not about religion, he says. It’s about humanity. It’s about believing in humanity, about living in fear but having hope. But yes, it is about religion, about faith.

Wait a minute, I say. I’ve heard stories, too. Stories about your father, stories about his friends. People said they were crazy. Maybe, he says. People say they made it all up, I say, that none of it ever even happened. Just a lot of fairytales, with a nightmare ending. And yet here I am, he says. Here you are, I say, beginning to sound crazy, like your father and his friends. Maybe so, he says. Maybe none of it is true. Maybe they were fools, and I’m a fool, too. I’m just a fisherman.

But today I read something. It talked about all that nonsense, and the writer wasn’t defending himself or his faith, but encouraging others. I confess, it didn’t say anything meaningful about what happened a few years ago. Maybe the writer doesn’t believe it anymore than you do. But the thing is, he’s a Roman, who rejected all his privilege to talk about these things, to encourage others. I’m told he once thought as you did. As I do, if I’m being honest.

What? I say. I have doubts, he says. Of course I do. I’m just a simple fisherman. Like you, I’ve been doing this all my life, just as my father did, and his father before him. I see little difference, except how I view the world. Now, I see hope. Not because I was promised some great reward, but because...I guess because I can forgive others, and maybe myself, a little better than before. I don’t know. It’s not easy to talk about.

Fine, I say. Whatever.

The rest of the day I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve heard so much. A lot of conflicting things, competing things. I never took any of it seriously. I didn’t see why it was relevant, leading a life that would be the same, one way or the other, same as anyone else. But that man...

He bothers me. He made me think, not in some philosophical manner. Or maybe so. He asks so much. He wants me to rethink everything. And of course it’s absurd. Of course it is. But. It also makes sense. When he talked about how it affected him, it didn’t sound stupid at all. It sounded reasonable.

I almost hate the man. I resent him. I wish today had never happened. I could have lived the rest of my life as I had before. But I can’t.

I...believe.

I believe. I believe.

I believe.

And it changes everything.

I believe.

The Second Night

The second night is worse than the first, and the first was one of the worst nights ever.

In retrospect, many of us were thinking, Well, that didn’t last long. We had just spent the last few years following him around in his travels, watching the impossible happen every day. It wasn’t really about the miracles. Knowing they were real didn’t make much of a difference. All of us had seen bogus miracles performed, and...it’s really like magic. To the untrained eye they’re indistinguishable.

No, it was more about his strange combination of uncompromising authority and...compassion. We spent a lot of sleepless nights mulling these things over. None of us could live up to his standards. It was impossible. But knowing him was enough for us to want to try. Even when he soundly rebuked us in our human failing, which we understood, eventually, was the very thing he had come to forgive...somehow it made sense. Even though he was perfect, he was imperfect, too, which made him human to us, and, of course, divine. The one went with the other. Again, it was the combination that made him so undeniable, even when we struggled so much to grasp what eventually seemed...the most basic fact in the whole history of the world.

There wasn’t a lot of learning between us. Few of us could read, or write, and aside from our previous devotion to the baptist, we hadn’t been pillars of faith to anyone, much less well-known visitors of synagogues and the temple. We were humble folk. A lot of people said that made us gullible, that we would believe anything, as long as it made our lives a little easier.

But it didn’t. It made our lives, if anything, harder. Aside from defending him on a constant, relentless basis, which itself was difficult, especially for those of us not previously familiar with sustained socializing, there was, of course, the standard we were supposed to follow, which as I’ve said, was hard enough itself. We felt like constant failures. We never needed him to say anything about it. Secretly we were grateful, though. He cared. That was the whole point.

Then, of course, the authorities decided they’d had enough. They hated him constantly challenging them, embarrassing them. There was no way they looked better than he did. All they had was tradition and empty titles. He knew everything they only professed to know, and he claimed no title except the one he was born with, the one he told us led to...

Listen, we all struggled with it. It was inconceivable. In the beginning some of us were convinced everything would lead to...Even if none of us were born fighters, we thought if pressed, and with enough of us, we could accomplish anything. We thought we would be kings. He never once suggested such a fate. Then of course he told us what really awaited him, the thing he was always meant to do, the reason he was here at all.

It sounded like a tragedy.

And it felt like a tragedy. Most of us stayed as far away, when it finally happened, as we could. Some of us lingered and then, ashamed, fled. A very select number witnessed the final moments. All of us heard, every detail, of how it ended. It was an agony. I can’t even begin to express it. And we had been revealed as cowards. We had never deserved to share those years with him.

This morning we gathered, and one by one talked about the preceding night. None of us had slept a wink. Some of us admitted we owed him that much. His last night was almost as bad as his last day. We had all known people tried by the Romans, executed by them. We had all seen fields of crucifixes. And we had all, in our cowardice, looked toward the hill with its empty crosses, long hours after his death, after he had been placed in the tomb.

Most of us were still crying. Most of us wouldn’t stop for a long time. Some of us are still crying tonight.

I’m crying, too, but... I also wonder. I wonder if this was the plan all along. I mean, I know it was. It is a terrible knowledge, which he lived with all his life. And he struggled with it, too, and if he struggled with it...Maybe we were cowards so we would live, so we could...There was always a plan. God knows everything. He sees everything, past present and future, all at once. And he saw and he understood. He knew what would happen.

And it was terrible knowledge, and great knowledge. He saw us struggle for a long time, and I have no doubt we will continue to struggle...

So on this night, this worst of all nights, I hope tomorrow brings...And if it does...when it does, I will cry once more. I should be empty of tears. But these will be different.

I believe. It hurts to have experienced all this, but I am grateful.

I believe. I believe.

I believe.

The Cover Age, Chapter 4

We walked for a while in silence. There’s still plenty of traffic on the roads. There are pictures in major cities of empty streets, but where I live the lockdown does not seem to have significantly impacted commutes, although a friend told me uptown the difference is noticeable. I guess local activity becomes more local in something like this. I want to compare it to vultures, but that sounds needlessly grim.

“Ah, this...ex of yours,” Clive said, he began. After a moment I realized he didn’t know how to continue.

“Yes, my evil ex,” I said. “Joking. Mostly. He’s my ex. He’s supposed to sound bad. But the thing about Oliver, the thing I loved so much and hated so much about him, was that stupid air of mystery he always projected. I used to think it was deliberate, or that he thought he was protecting me, or that he thought it made him more attractive, but...Now I wonder if it even crossed his mind. I mean, I know he felt bad about it, when he saw how it was affecting our relationship...”

“I, uh, I don’t really want to talk about your, about your relationship,” Clive said. “If that’s okay.”

“Ha,” I said. “Sure, yeah. I get it. Not really relevant, in the grand scheme.”

“Oh, it probably is,” Clive said. “I just don’t want to hear about it.”

“You know, you’re absolutely right,” I said. “There’s food trucks around town. Sounds pretty random, but that is apparently a quarantine thing. Want to stop at one?”

“Really?” Clive said.

“There’s donut trucks, pretzel trucks,” I said.

“People are getting desperate,” Clive said.

“Is that a no?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” Clive said. “I mean, yes. Hell yes.”

Clive turned out to be charming, in the awkward kind of way. It was nice to discover.

“He lives somewhere in town?” Clive asked, while we approached a pretzel truck, after spotting a guy holding a sign across the street for it.

“Busses are free at the moment,” I said. “He lives on the north end.”

“No salt, please,” Clive said to the vendor.

“This is going to get weird, you know,” I said.

“It’s already weird,” Clive said. “All, all of it.”

“But,” I said. “It’s going to get weirder. I need you to trust me.”

“You or your evil ex?” Clive said, getting bolder, eating his unsalted pretzel.

“Both,” I said. “Probably both.”

“But mostly the evil ex,” Clive suggested.

“I regret calling him evil,” I said.

“But he is evil,” Clive said. “This isn’t going to be a cult thing, is it? I’m not into cults. I’m telling you that right now.”

“It’s not a cult thing,” I said. “Mostly. Not in the way you’re thinking, anyway. Not like that crazy church in town, defying the social distancing order. Putting our town on the map for all the wrong reasons.”

“Well, there’s also the whole Tiger King thing,” Clive said.

“People aren’t even going to remember that in ten years,” I said.

“Helps pass the time,” Clive said.

“And there’s the bus,” I said. Headed toward it, I realized I’d of course forgotten to order my own pretzel. Clive didn’t seem to have noticed. He was throwing away his wrapper as he approached. Oliver had better have a good reason for dragging him into this...

The Cover Age, Chapter 3

Owing to the restrictions of a lockdown, I couldn’t exactly drop by for a visit. I instead suggested we meet up at a park, like we were a couple of spies.

Most public gatherings have been disrupted, most venues shuttered. The park I suggested had a pond, and when I arrived there were ducks in great abundance. No other people, yet. Plenty of runners out there, but that was about it, and they stuck to streets. They say an effect of the pandemic is nature slowly reclaiming itself, which apparently happens much more rapidly than we’d like to believe, although if we’re being honest happens in all manner of small ways all the time, with half the business of civilization tidying up mundane matters like dust and cobwebs.

I hadn’t brought anything for the ducks, but they seemed not to notice. They ambled about, merrily, business as usual. I had never met Clive in person, couldn’t possibly know what he looked like, Clive being one of those bloggers who never shared a picture, but it was an easy guess when a man with thinning hair, an uncertain shuffle, and a nervous expression behind blue frames approached.

“They’re my kid’s idea,” he said. “Also, you’re a girl.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Wife left me a few years back,” he said. “Claimed I spent more time writing than snuggling. Probably true.”

Which would be an understatement. Clive is editor of his own small press, always pumping out new anthologies, often simultaneously. Difficult to know how he would find time for anything else, much less a wife, much less a kid.

“Blue frames?” I couldn’t help pointing out again.

“They’re surprisingly common these days,” he said.

“So yeah,” I said, “I’m a girl. Never really came up. Real name’s Marietta. Fox is a lark. Long story.”

“Right,” he said. “So, you really believe what you wrote?”

“When it comes to Oliver Row, I believe everything,” I said. “And, of course, doubt everything.”

“This thing is making everyone crazy as it is,” he said. “Makes as much sense as anything.”

We kept a good distance between us. I sat on the bench, as Clive had found me, and he stood a little off. Turns out he’d thought of the ducks, peeled away at a chunk of bread he may have baked himself, whether because of the lockdown or a hobby. I had no way of knowing. Didn’t particularly care.

“Interesting, meeting you like this,” he said. “Sort of feel like you were stalking me, all these years.”

“Coincidence,” I said. “Oliver lives here, too. Meeting you is my way of finding the strength to reunite with him. Ex. Bad breakup.”

“I see,” he said.

“No offense, but you can’t even begin to imagine,” I said.

There was another awkward pause, though there was a lot of that going around.

“Is this a quest?” he asked. “Is that what you asked me to come here for?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Still deciding.”

“The kid’s with my ex, by the way,” he said. “Nothing pressing. Except, y’know, state mandates. We could get in a lot of trouble.”

“Probably,” I said. “But then again, probably worth it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You know you’re crazy, right? I’m not talking just now. Your blogging is crazy. Thought I’d point that out, just to be clear.”

I got up and headed off. Clive followed. The ducks went about their business.

The Cover Age, Chapter 2

Suddenly I’m a blogger with a hot story, and I don’t want to write it. Sounds crazy. Bloggers will write anything. That’s kind of the point. Not in the way people feel free to voice any idiot opinion on social media, or in comments, but in that they have clearly given the idea thought, and they’re not just hoping their ideas will be lost in the shuffle, however crazy or awful, just because everyone knows that’s what everyone expects. Bloggers can usually depend a reasonably warm reception. Anyone who routinely visits them has usually deliberately sought them out, and has determined their viewpoint is sound, or at least entertaining, or at worst merely considers them a friend.

So what I’m doing is trying to frame this story in terms of how, say, Clive will respond to it. Clive’s the reader who always shows up, always has something to say. I can already guess how he would react to this. And that’s why I don’t want to write it up.

Instead I go for a walk. I haven’t really been outside in days. I’ve stuck my head out here and there, running brief errands like checking the mail or shopping across the street, but for the most part, because of the lockdown, I’ve stayed home, as I imagine most people are (although I still see plenty of traffic on the streets whenever I head out). I grab a book, because I walk and read, and hope I can clear my head.

It’s a hot day, and before too long I’m sweating. Later I’ll wonder if the sun got to me because of how long I was out, or because it had been so long since I was out for any real length of time, or, probably, both. I find toilet paper, one of the scarcest commodities, but the cheapest kind, of course. I don’t read much, in the end, but it’s still interesting; I’m still convinced that Stephen King was heavily inspired by The Outsiders. One of his many recent books was in fact titled The Outsider. Could be a coincidence. I figure, probably not.

The walk kills a few hours, and as a bonus I have a different kind of meal, a barbecue chicken wrap (for whatever reason I kept buying the wrong wrap the last few times), rather than the variations of pasta that has become my pandemic diet (other than snack food).

But I’m no closer to reaching a decision. In fact, I didn’t think about the story at all the whole time I was out. Now, though, I’m starting to form a resolution. I’m going to have to head out again.

I post something on the blog, addressing Clive directly, and he responds within a few hours. I’ve moved around a lot over the years. Clive, in his own blogging, was never shy about where he lives. Whether it was because in the end he seemed as real a friend as I had at that point or not, but now I live in the same city, and I finally told him. We’re going to meet up.

What I haven’t told him yet is that my ex lives here, too.

Well, as they say, May you live in interesting times...

The Cover Age, Chapter 1

Went to bed late last night. This is strange because lately every day is so long most of it is just trying to fill up the day. Not working. Taking lots of naps.

This state of affairs has been inflicted upon me by a pandemic. It was decided that everyone should stay at home, all the time.  Normally this is what I do anyway, but now it’s even more so, I guess. I’m a blogger. Blogging was a thing people did on the internet before social media flattened the curve, so to speak (heh). Some of us are still doing it, compulsively, in defiance, I guess, of convention. Bloggers don’t expect a huge audience. Those that find themselves with one might as well migrate to other social media. Bloggers have become subversives. We’re not trying to buck the system. We can say anything we want because we don’t expect anyone to really be noticing. Basically we talk to ourselves, and imagine that someone else might care.

Which is to say, blogging during pandemic is like venting.

In the comments, my internet pal Clive will remark in the comments, “Calm down, Fox!” Clive will say that in the full knowledge that in his own blogging he’s a regular hysteric, but as people tend to, he has different standards for me. He prefers to think of me either as the weirdo with the insane opinions, or the kindred spirit he just knows would make a good friend in the real world. Clive knows nothing about me in the real world. I don’t know the first real thing about him. For all I know, “Clive” isn’t even his real name. He thinks we’re roughly the same age. He even thinks I’m male. He’s probably right about one, but definitely wrong about the other.

At any rate, the situation with my ex would be very different if he weren’t! A lot more complicated, anyway. Or maybe less? Kind of hard to tell, with my ex. Sometimes I try to stalk my ex on social media, find out what he’s been up to, the past, oh, twenty years. Hey, for bloggers, time is relative.

Like everyone else, or so I think ought to be the case, I’m blogging about the pandemic. I mean, I can’t help it. This is what history is going to expect anyway, so I might as well play along and maybe put the thing in a perspective it’ll actually understand. The thing about current events, especially in this age, is that everyone thinks they understand what’s happening, when they’re really just trying desperately to react appropriately, never understanding for a moment that what they think is appropriate might actually be making things worse.

Case in point.

Anyway, a blogger in a pandemic might not seem like the kind of person who will be the best possible source of information. At best they provide commentary, right? I wish that were the case. I wish. Because this is the story of how waking up in a pandemic, trying to fill another day, becomes an  object lesson in being careful what you wish for.

Because the first thing I did, of course, when I got up was begin another blog post. Later, I received a comment, not from Clive, but from my ex. He wrote, “This is all a cover story.” And to anyone else, I might have responded, “Yeah, sure.” And perhaps I should have. Things would be a lot simpler...

Maybe this is all a fever dream. Maybe I finally caught it. But the thing is, what I did respond with was, “Okay. Tell me more.”

And his response changed everything.